Ten times more valuable than last week, but ten times less lucrative. The news business model needs fixing

The fact that the value of news to its users has shot up by orders of magnitudes the last week, but their ability to generate revenue has fallen to almost zero, tells its own story. The relationship between the media and the Internet always was, and always will be, a dysfunctional one as long as advertising plays any material role.

As advertisers withdraw their spending from any coronavirus-linked content, publishers’ addictive reliance on ad revenue has been broken. The media is being forced to go cold turkey, and once they’re off the drug they need to make sure they never get back on it.

But first they have to survive. Some of them will run out of money in weeks or months, now, despite the fact that the work they do has never been more important to their readers.

And there’s the rub. Their readers are not the customers, for the most part. If they were, newspapers would be fine, or - more likely - doing better than usual during this crisis. They would be able to focus on their readers, and the information that they need, and not on the clicks and data that drive advertising revenue.

This crisis has highlighted the insecurity of the way publishing makes its money online, and how we have established a fundamentally dysfunctional relationship between publishers and their primary consumers: their readers.

The good part of all this chaos and downturn is that we can learn from it, and start to make changes that ensure a more profitable future for the news industry. But how?

The answer is with Axate, and with casual payments. No subscription, no commitment, and it works anywhere. But for publishers with free, ad-funded sites is that it’s really hard to put a price sticker on something free, especially when your (miserable) ad revenue depends on maintaining volumes, users and data flow.

Things have changed. None of that matters any more. There IS no ad revenue, and the content is in voracious demand. Any publisher whose site has been free can ask their users to pay if they can, with Axate, and explain exactly why it matters.

 What they’ll be doing isn’t just throwing themselves a lifeline straight away but building the foundation for a completely different relationship between the media and the internet in future. If we emerge from this crisis with a user base who are used to casually paying as they go, across a wide variety of news products, why would it ever go back? The publisher whose product is most valued by users will make the most money. Clickbait, massive ad loads and intrusive trackers will offer no value to users and much, much less to publishers than it did before.

News has had its revenue cut off. Its users value news more than ever. Now’s the moment to re-set everything.